The Complaint: Tucker Carlson

As if the bow ties weren't bad enough, his television presence is painful too.

I'D LIKE THE OLD CONSERVATIVES BACK NOW, PLEASE. The iron oligarchs of my youth. Anything but the Impish Right of the new century. Oh, to be fair, I do bless the day on which my gal Annie Coulter arrived here from the Planet of the Ultravixens. But then along comes Tucker Carlson, dauphin prince of CNN and the most conspicuous public progeny of Mr. Turner's truncated dalliance with Ms. Fonda.

Young Tucker was briefly a political journalist, and a decent one, truth be told. Now, though, he's become a television star despite having roughly the same gift for the medium as a goat has for ice-skating. In fact, it recently was announced that Carlson would be leaving the staff of The Weekly Standard in order to "concentrate full time" on his nightly duties as the host of The Spin Room on CNN.

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And I am not kidding here, The Spin Room is the worst show in the history of television. Concentrate full time on his duties? What in God's name are they?

Watch the show. See Tucker jape with his cohost, a witless former Democratic bagman named Bill Press. See Tucker answer the phone. See Tucker read e-mails from the METALLICA RULES! school of political discourse. See Tucker play with puppets. (This actually happened.) See Tucker giggle at his own jokes. Bill Buckley wouldn't do this bullshit shtick, even with enough whiskey in him to float the Nimitz. Hell, it's hard to imagine Soupy Sales doing it, and he wore better bow ties than Tucker does. Last year, while on assignment with Senator John McCain, Tucker famously was detained briefly by the authorities in Vietnam. They gave him back. Boy, can those bastards hold a grudge.